[App] Posts randomly unarchived despite Archive being enabled. Is it a bug or a feature?

[u/this_is_inevitable]

We enabled "archive" in our sub a long time ago because we noticed a lot of businesses frequently using older posts to market themselves for SEO/AEO purposes. Also, trolls would post horrible comments under older posts to harass OPs because older posts are no longer under active community and mod surveillance.

One of our comment filters flagged a comment made today on an 8 month old post. This is how we found out that several posts (some of them are a few years old) have been randomly unarchived. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some posts have been opened for fresh comments again while others remain archived.

I found another post made a few days ago flagging the same issue, but no resolution was provided there.

I tried to turn the archive feature off and on again to see if maybe that fixes it, but no, those posts still remain open.

The random unarchiving of older posts coupled with "Related Posts" recommending those same posts to users is a perfect way to help trolls and spam escape supervision. I've already made this post highlighting the issues created in our sub by the "Related posts" feature and possible solutions to prevent them. But letting users participate under much older posts when mods specifically do not want further participation under them is so counterproductive.

Is there a reason why some posts are unarchived when others aren't?

[u/CorrectScale]

Hey u/this_is_inevitable - we're experimenting with extending the time window of auto archived posts, this is likely what you're noticing!

[u/this_is_inevitable → u/CorrectScale]

Thank you for the response. Are there plans to make it an adjustable feature? For eg. I would love to selectively unarchive some of the megathreads in our sub where people keep adding updated information, while keeping other posts archived.

[u/Froggypwns → u/CorrectScale]

Hey, I wanted to report that I'm seeing that with Old Reddit, the old posts are correctly archived, however while on Sh.Reddit users are able to vote and comment without issue.

[u/The_One_BelowAll_]

Probably a glitch or some ongoing experiment.

[u/this_is_inevitable → u/The_One_BelowAll_]

I hope so too. I'm temporarily using automod to flag all new comments under posts past their archival date till they fix this bug.

[u/SampleOfNone]

This app spam link flagger can report all comments made on old posts (whether they contain a link or not) on old posts where you can set what an old post is.

Combine it with Auto Post lock which can lock posts of a set age, but can also lock unlocked posts where someone comments on it.

lock removed posts does what is says on the tin.

Combined that should keep your sub safe whenever admins decide to experiment without warning